About

Ash Akhtar has been writing and listening to music since he can remember. Notable highlights of his 35 years include: creating and editing a magazine for his prep school; running around the UK’s city centres as an online tourism correspondent; working as features editor for a local paper and spending an electric 45 minutes time peeling potatoes in a chip shop.

After becoming a musician in his early teens, he progressed to being a turntablist styled DJ in his early 20s before touring to promote the mostly unsuccessful albums created in the process. Having now spent the last two decades suffused by word and sound, he is now frequently published online and in the pages of the national press. (Clash Magazine, The Line of Best Fit, Drowned in Sound, Subba Cultcha, musicOMH, God is in the TV, Rivmixx, Brainer Magazine [Quoted in The Independent]).

A full time arts officer, his overarching professional aim is to increase the visibility and accessibility to the arts. Whether a global, commercial visual venture or an independent, local piece: Ash is keen to support the artist’s vision and right to exploration.

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.
The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.
The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.
They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.
When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it.
The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

Oscar Wilde - The Portrait of Dorian Gray.